Introduction

I planned to use the newly acquired R220 as a pfSense box, so I needed to flash the RAID card to IT mode. I didn’t want to mess with RAID configurations, and since I was only passing through the drive to the operating system, RAID wasn’t needed.

Preperation

As with the H710 mini flash, I used the Fohdeesha Docs guide for flashing RAID cards. I had to modify some BIOS settings to do the flash. I was only able to disable Virtualization Technology as SR-IOV Global Enable and I/OAT DMA Engine seemed to not be an option on the R220. I shutdown the system and looked for the RAID battery. It looked like there was no battery on the H310, so I proceeded to the next steps. I had already had the FreeDOS and Debian ISOs on my Ventoy USB, so I plugged that in and proceeded to boot up the system.

Flashing

I forgot that FreeDOS wouldn’t boot unless I used BIOS instead of UEFI, so I had to restart the system and change that setting. I was pretty sure that I could go directly into the H310 Mini guide, but I wanted to see what information would be outputted. When I tried to boot into FreeDOS, I got the message Loading boot sector… booting… and it stuck there for a few minutes. I remember this boot being much quicker last time, so I wrote the ISOs to two USBs with Rufus using dd.

This time, FreeDOS booted up perfectly fine and I was able to type in info to learn more about my card. The product name was PERC H310 Adapter so I continued with the H310 guide.

I booted into Debian and did ipinfo to get the IP to SSH into the system. Nothing showed up and I got no output from the command. I then realized that the ethernet cable wasn’t plugged in, so I attached the cable and redid the command. With the IP details I was able to SSH via terminal on my Mac with the credentials of user/live.

I then followed the instructions and put in the following commands. Each after the previous one finished.

sudo su -
sas-h310
H310
reboot

After the reboot, I did another ipinfo and to my surpise, the IP was different. I SSH’d again with the same credentials to finsih the flashing process.

sudo su -
setsas 500605b123456777
info
flashboot /root/Bootloaders/mptsas2.rom
flashboot /root/Bootloaders/x64sas2.rom

With both the BIOS and UEFI boot flashed, I proceeded to reboot the system and renabled virtualization. I also set the boot back to UEFI in preperation for pfSense.

Conclusion

This was much easier than the first time I flashed with this software, but Ventoy not working did surpise me. With the H310 now flashed to IT mode, the system is ready to install any operating systems that I’d throw at it.